10k_Volts

It was always going to be hard for the game to capture that lightning in a bottle like it did for Shadowbringers. Nor did it have the breadth of story and lore to tie up and milk every last emotional morsel out of like in the case of Endwalker. This had to start from the beginning, and it shows, in some times painfully. I’ll not lie the first half really felt like the game was spinning it wheels, trying to glean 20-30 hours of story quests out of just a couple of overarching themes that quickly find yourself being repeated back to you endlessly (heh). The new slew of characters were mixed, their developments seemed to make less sense in comparison to the ones we’ve had more time with (Krile & Erinville). Wuk Lamat could have a lost a third of her screen time and that would have not impacted how I felt towards her. Instead, we saw her get herself into sometimes painfully obvious situations just so we can spend a few more quests cleaning up the mess. But thankfully in the second half, things get a little more interesting and without spoiling anything there is some good emotional beats towards the end, as well as a nice little helping of philosophical pondering about life and death - things that I absolutely loved as high points back in previous expansions. So I’m overall interested in seeing where it goes from here, there’s plenty of big questions still out there that are dying to be explored further As for the gameplay, I think we’re on the path of setting a new high point. The dungeons and trials so far have shown some great evolutions in mechanics. Things are definitely pushing a more chaotic side, which will be interesting to see how much of this translates into the savage content once it comes out, but so far it’s looking promising.

Brilliant and ever-beautiful storytelling complimented with great visuals and cinematography even if the cutscenes can get a bit verbose at times. Gameplay is as good as It's always been, super well-done dungeons and duties. Honestly, if you've played though XIV far enough to reach this expansion you're all but guaranteed an incredible experience. If Shadowbringers brought the feels, Endwalker walks all around in them.

The game is just a cash grab, it uses every old and overused trick in the book to encourage customers to pay even more money on top of the $3 you spent to buy it. The gameplay and just everything relating to the game itself is all focused around one thing, microtransactions. Now if all this were free then it wouldn't be an overly terrible experience and perhaps a decent enough little distraction for an hour or so but certainly not a worthy sequel to the RCT brand even if they whacked "Mobile" on the end of it. Atari's financials maybe in turmoil but RCT4 Mobile is probably the best example of what not to do with a long-beloved franchise when finances start laying down the pain.

For a $20 game, you can't expect everything, but Cities In Motion 2 does have quite a lot running for it which is good. If you like meticulously planning public transport then you're simply not going to find a better game. There is perhaps a lack of content in terms of maps and vehicles etc. which might put off some but the core game still does work and it really does look beautiful, I did spend a good few hours just admiring the scenery before I even started laying down routes. But your routes aren't limited to the tracks you place, you can also put roads wherever you please, create new expressways that link right into the heart of your city or divert traffic from problem roads. At first glance you don't realise the full scope of what you can do here and if building a utopian city where everybody can get where they want to go with the greatest of comfort, ease and luxury then this game will give you that opportunity, provided you have the skills necessary.

I've amended my review to reflect SimCity more accurately now that it can actually be played. So setting aside all the DRM crap and EA's crappy servers and other launch woes the rest of the game is alright. It's good but in all honesty the server's aren't the only thing wrong with this game. Traffic problems run rampant despite several patches to help this and it's almost assured that you will have a 4 mile long bank of traffic waiting to get into or leave your city on the only connecting road you're allowed to the region. Despite trying and trying it's just hard to really get that longevity out of the game. I'm not really sold on the multiplayer side of things. I did it once and thought cool, and after a few hours me and the 3 other players I was playing with had filled up most of the city blocks and were starting on a Great Work. Once that was finished then all we could really do was twiddle our thumbs. Traffic problems were horrendous but there was nothing we could do about that, there was only one road in and out of our cities. Sure we could start another region and do it all again but why? there's 8 maps to choose from, the level of variety is obscenely low. I guess I would like the multiplayer and perhaps just SimCity itself more if it actually kept many of the things that made the series so great to begin with. But instead this game forces many sacrifices of things for these new ideas which honestly detract a lot from those ideas. I constantly dream up the things I could do if my city borders were bigger or if I actually could build my own intercity transport routes but instead I'm stuck with what has been decided for me. SimCity has turned itself into a board game rather than being the sandbox city builder we onced loved.

I have this message to you low-scorers. You come to the FPS genre to be entertained in the FPS fashion. Funnily enough there's a certain limit on how many creative ways to kill someone and I think many of them would be way more overrated than this game. If you buy and play and FPS game and get turned off by the fact that you're actually just shooting people with weapons *gasp* I offer this suggestion on rethinking what actual genre and gamestyle you actually enjoy and perhaps refrain from purchasing these. So you say it's a generic shooter? Well what isn't a generic shooter? Portal can have kudos for being the outlier here, but the overwhelming majority of FPS games have funnily enough been no more than just a play on shooting the guy before he shoots you. I'm not sure where the style title First Person Shooter misleads people here, you must have been going into this expecting guns and a plentiful serving of foes to spray bullets into, if not then again look for another genre. And on the flipside there's no shortage of games that have become memorable for all of us that put more effort into the atmosphere than the shooting gameplay. Story is also a big thing brought up here. First of all if you actually take the time to explore and listen to the tapes things become far clearer. In these games you cannot just walk down the corridor, shoot this guy and the other and suddenly everything makes sense. You have to investigate and find things out for yourself. You are actively part of the story, you're not taking a backseat here watching someone else as you would reading a book or watching a movie. I might also agree that the story was a little convoluted at times but that doesn't mean the game is a complete fat 0. You were never meant to fully understand the movie Inception on just the first viewing and it doesn't deserve a low score just because of this or even if you hated the story altogether, you won't please everybody. So please, save those 0 scores for games that truly deserve it, not a game that is innocently using the FPS style as a means of telling a unique story.

The gameplay has come a long way from the original Crysis and combined with spectacular graphics does make an enjoyable experience. But the campaign was somewhat short and I found myself doing the exact same approach for every section. It was worth the half-price point I managed to buy it at but I'm not sure it was everything I hoped for if I spent anymore on it. The multiplayer was also not bad, although personally I lost interest after a couple of afternoon sessions.

This is basically the equivalent of downloading a mod that adds 1080p resolution support and a couple of texture changes/brushups most noticeably in the HUD and water/fire effects. Outside of this everything else is the same old Age of Empires II. After paying $20 for that It's a bit of a letdown honestly, there's so much more that could have been added to the game to really bring out the best of it but apart from a couple of additional parameters in standard game creation nothing has been considered or added even as a voluntary thing. The positive thing about this release is the workshop which I am sure will very quickly come to contain thousands of mods that hopefully address these issues but I do believe that it shouldn't be on the community to sort out problems the devs can't be bothered worrying about.

There really isn't much more you could have asked for when it came to bringing Half-Life into modern times. It's not a direct carbon copy, but what is different is definitely not detracting from anything at all. For a group of modders doing this in their spare time with no real funding, you have to sit back and appreciate just what has actually become of their hard work. I could so easily have dropped $30 on this game.

This game doesn't deserve a 3, at the time of writing I have had no problems with this game and this is about a week after launch. They have done well do address a lot of the issues that had plagued this game and now it is most defiantly playable and enjoyable. The game does expand on all fronts. Single Player campaign adds some decision making and also squad commanding which does help to refresh all the constant run-and-gun, explosions and general high-paced action (which this game still has plenty of, of course). Multiplayer adds League play and revamped custom classes and still enjoyable. Zombies adds many additional features like bigger maps and so on. All in all, it's still a Call of Duty game, if you hate the series with a dire passion, this isn't going to change your mind. But the game is trying to be creative and evolve without losing what people actually like about the Call of Duty franchise and it has achieved something by doing so.